Tag: camp

If you haven’t been following any of the calendars listing DrupalCamps, you may have missed the arrangement that’s coming up in Gothenburg, Sweden in a couple weeks. This wouldn’t be surprising, since it’s being marketed in Swedish. People of all languages are welcome, however, so I thought I’d somewhat rehash the post I made in Norwegian.

The camp’s pitch is: “A one-day conference focused on the Drupal CMS. Come along and learn more about Drupal and the web, and have a great day in Gothenburg in late Spring.”

Sessions are here: http://summer2013.drupalcamp.se/program/sessions

As with most DrupalCamp sites, volunteer work lies behind the site you see. A lot of people contributed really great work. Fantastic designs and solid development resulted in the site you see today. I was also involved, mostly behind the scenes. I helped with server administration, Git coordination, transferring the site to another server, and mostly with coordinating the web team’s efforts. It was the first time I had spent as much time helping organize a DrupalCamp (and I’ve been to quite a few; I’ve even volunteered at a couple).

If you’re in Europe or in the area, I encourage you to check it out. You can follow them on Twitter at @DrupalGBG.

I haven’t been blogging enough recently, but I will try to keep you posted with short updates at least. It’s been a busy first quarter of the year!

But I wanted to post to announce that I’m mentoring this training, which as I write is tomorrow. It’s full, so this is sure to be an interesting experience on my part. BuildAModule.com’s site is here (affiliate link).

I’ve been to several camps this summer and early fall, but I haven’t really written anything about them since I mentioned sponsoring DrupalCamp LA 2011. I’ve decided that I’ll probably never document them individually but that a combined blog post would be reasonable. I’ll write this soon, probably next week (once things calm down a bit).

This weekend, I attended the first DrupalCamp in the Sacramento, California area. It happened to be held in Davis, a location which worked for me.

Some of you might know that I was talking about taking Amtrak’s Coast Starlight up to the Bay Area. I indeed did. Here’s some pictures: (flickr link coming soon; I have to upload the pictures).

But as for the camp itself, it’s best to break it down into the sessions I attended and then give my overall impressions.

Day 1

As every attendee certainly did, I started off my day listening to Nate Haug (@quicksketch)’s keynote speech. He talked about the community, contributing, contributing productively, collaboration, and the care shown to community members. It was a good start. After that, I went to my first session.

10-11:30: VoIP for Drupal: Turning Drupal into a phone system

The title of this presentation had intrigued me, and I’m glad I checked it out. Adam Kalsey (@akalsey) of Tropo did a fantastic job of demonstrating the VoIP module and how command sets could be sent to phone systems using PHP code.

1:00-2:30 – Using Drupal as an Application Development Platform

This was a neat presentation as well. It was also presented by Adam Kalsey. His thesis was essentially that Drupal is an application development platform that ships with a great CMS as its default implementation. He defended this fairly, outlining many of the subsystems that I indeed deal with regularly.

2:30-4:00 – Building a Distribution using Features, Drush Make, Installation Profiles, and more

Ben Shell gave a fascinating presentation on the topic above. I found this very useful, as it cleared up some questions I had regarding the whole thing. I liked how he spoke a bit about how to get drupal.org to fully package your distribution or installation profile for download!

Some dude who came from L.A. gave this one. I think his name was Kevin Kaland or something. Of course it was awesome; would I say otherwise? Fortunately, you don’t have to listen to me; Doug R. Wu has given a brief “str8up” account of the talk. That coupon code expires Monday, by the way.

Day 2

Morning-12 – Code sprint

Saturday ran late for some reason, and I got lost on the way back to campus, so I rolled in around 11 AM. I discovered that no organized code sprint was happening, so I worked more on adding Webform token support to Fill PDF on Drupal 7. This is completed now.

1:00-2:30 – Why Drupal uses hooks, and why you should too

I bumped into that Kevin Kaland guy again at this talk. Something about hooks in Drupal. People liked it or something. (If you blogged about this talk, can you link to it in the comments?)

2:30-4:00 – Know Where The Fire Is (Monitoring Drupal Sites)

I wrapped up my camp with Mike Hathaway’s Nagios talk. It was cool; Nagios is definitely a tool l will have to try some time, along with the Drupal Nagios module of course!

Conclusion

So ended my camp, and so began my transportational journey back…with a new sticker on my laptop!

Thanks again goes to Oliver Seldman for inviting me to co-present this with him originally and for all the help with the slides and content, especially the simplicity of the presentation. Please give him your money.

I volunteered to create some attendee badges for the camp. You can put them on your site to show you’re attending and help spark interest in others. Find them here, complete with HTML embed code: Drupal Camp Sacramento Area 2011 Attendee Badges/